


The Roses of Eberbach

by Filigree



Series: Roses [2]
Category: Eroica Yori Ai o Komete | From Eroica with Love
Genre: Deathfic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-24
Updated: 2010-11-24
Packaged: 2017-10-13 08:51:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/135424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Filigree/pseuds/Filigree
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Klaus in the aftermath.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Roses of Eberbach

After thirty-five years, the roses of Schloss Eberbach were nearly as famous as the castle’s master. Rose-trees, transplanted from an English estate, grew in huge granite urns on the front terrace. In the gardens climbing the slope behind the castle, rose-arbors exuded swaths of changing perfume: the pure scent of ‘Rose de Rescht’, a hint of lily-of-the-valley from purple ‘Veilchenblau’, a sharp sweet tang of apples from salmon sprays of Rosa luciae. Feral varieties of Gallica and Damascena twined through the surrounding hunting-preserve, enlivening the forest with intoxicating scents and splashes of crimson and deep purple. Tourists motored up from Bonn regularly, to take pictures and marvel.

This mild summer afternoon was no exception. A bus-load of chattering Americans had invaded the grounds earlier, to the delight of the gardeners and the chagrin of the security personnel.

None of the civilians caught sight of the tall old man watching from behind an iron rail on the flat rooftop. He lifted one hand to his neck, where a platinum and aquamarine necklace lay between soft synthetic wool and his own parchment-fine skin. Sometimes, the weight hurt him. But it was too much a symbol of endurance for him to quit wearing it.

 _The morning of Dorian’s funeral, he’d tracked down the jeweler at her hotel, even before the gallery opened. Bought the necklaces from a sleepy and stammering young artist who could not stop looking at him. Dry-eyed, he’d shown her examples for the carvings of Gloria’s Rose and Eberbach’s Boar. “There is need for haste. They must be done by 1100 hours today,” he had said._

“Why?” She’d smiled back in tentative flirtation, “Is it for a wedding?”

“Nein.” He was still shocked to hear it, even in his own level voice. “One is mine, for remembrance. The other is a grave-gift.”

“Ohh,” she’d said, all gentle sympathy. “You loved her?”

To a total stranger, heedless of the impropriety and insane risk, Klaus was able to correct: “Him. I loved him – “

Under cover of placing a pious sheaf of white lilies into the coffin, he’d quietly tucked the emerald necklace under Dorian’s folded hands. He’d touched dead men’s hands before. The inert feel of these convinced him at last: the Earl was gone forever. Dorian’s flesh had always radiated life and energy, in Klaus’ reluctant contacts with it. This was only a husk wearing too much make-up and a dapper white silk suit, its golden hair clean and shining, a cravat like a lace waterfall hiding its shattered throat. Klaus had no right to assume that its spirit had lingered to watch or care about his feeble expiations.

The next dawn, he’d begun a grim ritual that would carry him through the rest of his days.

A guard, spotting movement on the roof-line, glanced up and saluted smartly.

Klaus returned the gesture. They didn’t need to guard him anymore, bless them, but habit was habit. Z had trained them well, after being coaxed out of his own early retirement. Some of Z’s adoration had obviously rubbed off on the volunteers. Probably due to the wild stories he told, of missions declassified and now open to public scrutiny. Better for all, Klaus thought, that some mission de-briefing records been destroyed instead of filed.

 _A year after Dorian’s death, on a mountainside in Montenegro, Klaus and his younger subordinate had viewed the wreckage of a commuter airplane. “Anybody moving?” Z asked, trying to get a better look with his night-vision goggles._

“Nein,” said Klaus, “But I’d better make certain. Stay here and stand watch, eh? If I get caught, just leave.”

He’d slogged down to the impact site, spent an efficient fifteen minutes finishing the assignment to the best of his abilities. He felt no remorse. The original objective had been to hijack the plane and deliver its occupants to U.N. Security forces waiting in neutral territory. Events forced him to obey the secondary directive coded into his orders. A man, his wife, and seven of his closest political cronies must not be allowed to exchange Serbia for anywhere but jail and trial in The Hague – or in Hell.

Klaus hadn’t felt any joy in personal revenge, either. Nine lives, ended in tribute to one. A sabotaged plane, in return for a single casual bullet. He could justify it in terms of world security and a favor to the War Crimes Tribunal. For himself, it was only another job, to be done as neatly as possible.

Later, in a safehouse two countries away, Z poured Klaus a glass of strong amber whiskey. When the other man continued pensively watching him, Klaus growled, “Was ist das?”

“Glenfiddich. From Scotland. I tried to find something English – “

“Nein. They make swill. This is acceptable,” said Klaus, and knocked back the glass in one gulp. Z refilled it, shoved it across the table again. Klaus eyed him suspiciously. “Aren’t you drinking any?”

Z shook his head. “I’m not the one who’s in danger of losing my soul.”

Klaus didn’t touch the liquor. “Is that what you think happened, when I went to that plane?”

Z was being unusually brave. “I think you buried your heart last year, Major. And now you’re just marking time, until you don’t come back from a mission. And I think – it’s a waste, to watch you bury your soul as well.”

“I don’t,” said Klaus. He wasn’t angry.

“There has to be something worth living for,” Z said, not hiding the passion in his blue eyes.

Klaus sighed. It had taken Dorian’s death, and its accompanied revelations about Klaus himself, to reveal the scope of Z’s crush on him. “I’m sorry. You are too late.”

“Am I?” The blond agent leaned forward, brushed his lips across Klaus’. The pressure was light, wary, almost chaste; inciting no frantic outrage, and no longing. It was simply human comfort, and an offer for more of the same. “You don’t need to love me back, Major,” Z whispered. “Just let me help you.”

Klaus almost laughed at the vicious justice of it. “You can’t,” he told Z, suddenly weary of a year of discreet, unsuccessful experiments with women. “You can try.”

Z had tried, down to some explicit caresses that should have got him thrown across the room. Finally: “Nothing?” he’d asked in disbelief.

“Nothing. Not your fault,” Klaus soothed, awkwardly petting the feathery yellow hair. “I just – can’t. It is God’s joke. Or curse. That I could love only once, and learn it too late.”

Silently, they’d gone to their separate beds. Klaus was aware that with effort and trust, he might have helped Z, and eventually himself. Dorian would have wanted him to heal. But Dorian was gone, and Z young enough to find better company. Klaus embraced the emptiness, instead, and gave it permission to drown him.

It almost had.

He’d been such an idiotic martyr, in those first harrowing years.

After a minute or two of grinning at his own selfish delusions, Klaus limped away from the railing. His left arm and leg were stiff from pain. He settled awkwardly into a padded chair. An old-fashioned flatscreen computer, downloaded with his three favorite news services, waited on a side-table. Other comforts waited, too – a near-empty bottle of good ‘06 Glenfiddich from a party the week before. An antique butane lighter. A pack of custom-blended herbal cigarettes.

Klaus lit one and took a long drag of smoke, wincing at the sudden flare of pain in his chest.

He did not regret the last thirty-five years, filled with challenges and setbacks, tricky enemies, and wonderful people who tried valiantly to keep him alive. He’d not dishonored them. His heirs lived in a world that was a cleaner, saner, slightly-safer place than it had been at the turn of this millenium. Upon the century-mark of the beginning of the Deutschland’s greatest shame, to be German was no embarrassment at all. Not the strident hubris of Klaus’ infamous predecessor, true. But citizenship of a world slowly shaking off pollution, poverty, and repression was no bad thing.

It still amazed Klaus that he’d had a small part in that renaissance – and that he’d jumped into politics for no other reason than a dream. Klaus was a man formed by the Cold War. By guns, brawls, secrets learned and told in shadow. A hired thug. His words, when he began speaking in public, had been sparse and simple, the apology of an aristocrat who’d realized he’d been shirking his duties to his land and his people. He’d started small, on the local level around Schloss Eberbach, when his children were young and he wanted to be home for them. He hadn’t been too startled when the job grew, with time.

Dorian’s ghost had called him ‘Chancellor.’

Klaus took another drag on the cigarette. The smoke tasted sweet in his mouth.

 _“My God, Klaus, if you must do that,” the American mother of his three children had snarled at him, “at least try these. I’m not going to let you poison the little ones with secondhand-smoke. You know I hate cigarettes – and you know why!”_

Three years after Dorian’s death, Klaus had met her and her husband during a bizarre mission in Washington D.C. He had saved their lives. In the aftermath, they decided to save his, by giving him something more immediate than NATO or the Deutschland to live for.

Klaus had never kissed her, much less made love to her. What he had learned in Z’s arms was still true: he could no longer react to sexual intimacy. From anyone but himself, really, and even then the experience was always bitter with grief. So the conceptions were achieved coldly, in a fertility clinic’s test-tube, and the first two embryos grown to term in German surrogates’ wombs. But the children were genetically half his, Eberbach in the eyes of law, a gift unlooked-for from this happily-married woman.

He could deny her nothing. So, with a muttered “Ja, ja, Frau Doktor,” he’d tried the damned fake cigarettes. They’d tasted of mint, cherry-bark, and English roses. After he’d finished crying, he flushed the nicotine-laden ones down the sewers.

Now the flatscreen chimed at him, bringing him gently out of memory. The news script blurred into a young man’s smiling face. His sharp, handsome features and dark hair could have been his father’s at the same age. But Klaus von dem Eberbach had never bubbled with such easy, infectious hilarity.

“Guten Tag, Papa! See, I can too call back on the same day! Guess where I’m calling from?”

“Antarctica?” Klaus rumbled dryly. “The Brazilian rain forest? The White House? A nightclub in Amsterdam?” All of these were a possibility, with Erich von dem Eberbach. Klaus squinted at the image. The background was industrial white plastic and dark instrument panels, and apparently curved instead of flat. Erich’s grey coveralls seemed to float slightly off his lean shoulders, and the hair had been carefully tamed into place with a gel. “You’re in orbit, you scoundrel!”

His own icy-green eyes looked appraisingly back at him. A chorus of jeering yells sounded in the background, and Klaus saw someone cartwheeling in free-fall behind Erich. “You see too much, Iron Chancellor,” sighed his second-born.

“Ex-Chancellor,” Klaus reminded him. “As of last week.”

“I know. Sorry I couldn’t be at the party, Papa, but the station needed – “

“S’all right. You’re all grown up now, with a big job of your own, Project Director Eberbach! And the party was just another boring government function. No one even tried to shoot me,” Klaus chuckled.

“You might not get out of the way, if they did,” Erich said softly, all laughter gone. “That’s what I don’t like about this growing-up business. That you might think we don’t need you anymore, and that you’re free to go – “ His son said nothing else, but Klaus knew the memory shared between them:

 _Sixteen-year-old ‘Lissa and eleven-year-old Rosa had been in Washington on their yearly visit with their mother, godfather, and half-siblings. That was the way the Eberbach family handled travel, as a matter of course – never all on the same trip, always shadowed by the Chancellor’s men, the children always equipped with the latest self-defense techniques and gadgets. Arming the younglings was something of a genial rivalry between father and godfather._

After a particularly exhausting bit of political juggling in Munich, Klaus had fled to Eberbach for some quietly drunken soul-searching. Near dawn, fourteen-year-old Erich had silently walked in on him, and witnessed his father assembling the old semi-automatic from Klaus’ service days in NATO. Then Klaus calmly loaded the gun, rested his chin on the upward-pointing barrel, closed his eyes, and stroked the trigger with one long finger. “Is it time?”Klaus had asked himself. A pause of precisely ten fast heartbeats, while the day’s needs and joys were measured against old pain. “No, not today. Perhaps tomorrow,” he’d whispered, and opened his eyes at Erich’s tiny gasp.

“Papa?” began the young man up in the space station, “Don’t – don’t be messy.” No other words, but Klaus knew his son was thinking of the promises exacted on that dreadful dawn.

“S all right. I won’t. Doesn’t look like I have to do anything but wait, now,” said Klaus, wiping tears out of his eyes. “Come down as soon as you can. Your sisters will need you.”

All their farewells had been said when Erich was fourteen. When Klaus had explained the ritual of the gun, the reason for Eberbach’s roses, the reason why his children had a mother but he had no wife. When Erich had promised Klaus that, when the time came, he would not interfere –

“Auf Wiedersehen, Papa,” said Erich, holding to his promise.

A little later, after Klaus recovered from the latest spasm in his chest, he tapped in a call to Melissa.

She answered with a two-year-old boy in her arms, his chubby fists caught in her sleek coppery hair. Klaus blinked at them both, fondly.

“Matteo, look! It’s your Grandpapa, wave to him. There’s a good boy.” Her German had a northern Italian lilt to it now, mixed in with the old Americanisms.

Klaus doubted the boy knew him as more than a vague tall presence on the holidays. This, too, I shall miss. Watching him grow into a person. “ ‘Lissa, my dear one,” he began. “You’re looking well. I’ve a favor to ask. Will you and Tomas be busy with your Mailand practice, in the next week?”

Melissa had her mother’s red hair and blue-grey eyes, calm logic, deep faith, and fierce loyalty. Klaus had never doubted his firstborn would be a fine medic. Or anything else she wanted to be. Already nonplussed that his seed had created a girl-child, he’d made sure she grew up knowing that no goal could be beyond her will.

Except this last, harsh lesson –

“Nothing our assistants can’t handle,” she answered absently, setting her son down outside of video range. “What do you – oh.” She knew his weaknesses as well as his regular doctors. “Papa, are you hurting? Why weren’t your doctors notified? Lie back and stay on the line, I’m paging the ambulance right now – “

“ ‘Lissa, don’t. There isn’t time. I sabotaged the monitor-patch this morning. I am ready.”

“I’m not!”

The pressure around his heart relaxed, enough to let him continue. “I love you all. I’m so proud of you. I wish I could stay, but I can’t. Can you – call your mother and tell her – tell her and Uncle Spooky and Uncle Alex that I am still so very, very grateful for their gifts. Be there for your little brother and sister.” The vice tightened. “I have to go.”

He turned off the computer, just before his eyesight narrowed down to a bright spot surrounded by darkness. His faltering pulse roared in his ears, the only sound in the world. Time seemed to stretch into stasis.

He’d forgotten to call Rosa. No need. She might have felt the mildest onset of his pains, early this morning. Paused in her busy day at University, as he had paused to let the agony crest and recede. That intermittent link, they’d shared ever since she’d first been placed in his arms.

She was the strangest gift of all, one of the first European children conceived and gestated entirely in-vitro. Klaus had worried that she might grow up as cold and repressed as himself. That fear eased, with the help of the children’s excellent nanny and his own attempts at being an attentive father.

His Rose-child, of the straight bronze-gold hair and blue-green eyes. She could have been an impossible mix of Klaus and his one lost love. By skill and temperament, she was now Eberbach’s heir. The old name would be hers even in marriage, the castle and estates her domain, and likely the political career. It had been Rosa, of all his children, who loved most the endless debates in his office and around the dinner table.

She would be on the Autobahn, her big hydrogen-powered Benz in earthbound flight toward Eberbach. Get off the road, he told her silently, knowing she would sense it. I don’t want you caught in the storm. But she was as good a driver as he’d once been, and as stubborn. She would not stop for a little thing like chest pain.

His eyesight came back, but not all the way. Colors were dimmed, outlines vague. The latest agonies eased a bit, and he actually felt sleepy. He yawned. How strange. He’d never thought he would be allowed to die quietly of old age. For a long time, he’d had the choice of an assassin’s bullet or his own ritual test of courage. He’d never quite known what he was testing. What was courage? Dying, or living?

In spite of the pain he slept, and dreamed that he opened his eyes. The clouds in the twilight sky were the same colors as his roses: gold, coral, ivory, salmon, searing scarlet, red-black, and a softly dulled lavender-grey. The air itself had a luminous purple tint.

He could no longer sense Rosa.

His chest didn’t hurt anymore. He was grateful for this dream, that let him stand with all his old strength and walk once more to the iron railing. The tourists were gone. The gardeners had retired to their homes in the village. He couldn’t spot any of the guards, or their dogs and security-robots. In the side-wings of the Schloss, no lights glowed. A clean wind swept down from the heights, and blew his long hair into his eyes. He pawed impatiently at an errant tress, noticed in passing that it was inky-black again instead of silver. That seemed right.

The light faded. He left the roof. Walked down dark halls and empty stairs toward the main foyer. He met no one on the way. Every so often, a flicker of strobing red-and-blue light seemed to dazzle off a mirror or a polished set of armor. He could not find the flicker’s source, or track the faint whispery voices that called to him from dark doorways. It seemed that one voice was Rosa’s. She sounded sad and angry at once. Why? He was only going for a little walk –

One leaf of the massive front doors opened noiselessly at his touch, letting him out into the scented dusk. He’d not walked freely about the estate for several years, since his latest stroke. He reveled in it now: running, jumping fences, scrambling boyishly halfway up trees and then dropping with easy grace. In a clearing walled with roses, he stopped, his gaze pulled upward to the calm stars beyond the clouds.

Dorian would have loved the sight.

Dorian was dead.

But maybe not in this dream --

“Dorian,” Klaus whispered. “Please be here. I miss you.” Only the crickets in the forest replied. Alone in the dream, now he was restless and disenchanted with it. “I want to wake up,” he told the perfect night. But waking would be no better, held fast in a self-destructing body that had rejected anti-aging treatments. “No, I want to die. Set me free.” No help or answer there, either. He was not afraid of death or judgement, only tired beyond measure.

He walked up into the terraced gardens. Beside a fountain, he sat down and waited for the dream to end, one way or another. It was restful, after his earlier pique. Nothing to think about. Nothing to do, but let his self-awareness unravel into the night breezes, the sound of splashing water, the ever-present scent of roses. Clouds and stars spun slowly across the indigo sky.

A light swelled behind the eastern hills: the moon.

At the same moment that a rim of white showed above the skyline, strong warm fingers clasped his right hand. Klaus did not look aside from the rising moon, but pulled the familiar body against his in companionable silence. A head nestled against his shoulder. Soft hair tickled his cheek.

At length, the silver spark became a curve like a sail, then lifted free of the horizon.

“When I was small,” Klaus said quietly, “I was afraid of the three-quarter moon. I thought it seemed like the eye of a monster, trying to find me in the dark.”

Warm lips brushed his ear, and Dorian whispered back, “There is no monster. It’s just a lovely summer night. I wish it could last forever.”

“You mean it can’t, now?” Klaus still didn’t dare look at the vibrantly-alive body next to him, in case it vanished. But Dorian was here, instead of under a marble monument in the grave-place of the Earls Gloria. Klaus’ hair was black, and his body hale and young. He did not think this was a dream, anymore.

“Of course it can’t last,” snorted Dorian, trapping Klaus’ face in his hands and turning it from the moon. “Really, darling! We have things to do and people to meet.” Dorian’s face was warm ivory framed in moon-blanched curls. He wore something silken and fluttery, discernably red even in the moonlight. The platinum chain and its emerald gleamed at the base of his flawless throat. Glinting lashes shivered over his lovely eyes. His lips parted, half-smiling.

Klaus read the silent invitation, and leaned over to claim a relaxed kiss. Equally relaxed, as if they’d shared a life filled with such familiarities, Dorian kissed him back. Like the scent of food to a starving man, the feel and taste of Dorian’s mouth ignited Klaus’ long-quelled hungers. This, too, was right.

“I’m sorry I made you wait,” Klaus said when the long kiss ended. “Was it – bad?” He shuddered in the warmth of Dorian’s arms, at the thought of sepulchres and decay.

“No.” Dorian laughed, reading his newest guilt. “That wasn’t me – only my body. I’ve been other places. I’m only sorry I left you in torment. But you seemed to need it, my poor Major. Like steel on the anvil. You’re a better man, now, for it. Instead of an iron bar, a bright unbreakable blade – “

“You and poetry,” Klaus sniffed, now certain this was really his Dorian. “How long, before we – have to go?”

“Oh, enough time,” said Dorian. His fingers toyed suggestively with the aquamarine pendant on Klaus’ neck. “A night, I think. That’s standard.”

“Where are we going?”

“I don’t know. Where I’ve been, perhaps – “ Dorian’s voice went dreamy and cryptic: “To the Blessed Lands, to the Mountains of the Moon, to the Spiral’s Hub, to Avalon and Dreamtime and the River of Stars – it doesn’t matter, as long as I’m with you.”

“Not Hell?”

“No, my love,” Dorian said solemnly. “I think you’ve already been there.”

This time, Klaus laughed. He stood up, pulling Dorian with him. He set off, his beloved in tow, along the landscaped paths above the Schloss. “It has not been all bad. Even in Purgatory, there can be gardens. Let me show you the roses of Eberbach – “

 _Some hours past moonrise, a tall woman leaned against an iron railing on the roof of an empty castle. Her fingers strained white on the metal. She bit her lips to keep from sobbing aloud, and tears left silvery tracks down her cheeks. At length, the phantom intensity drained away from her nerves. She looked down into the moonlit gardens. Saw nothing. Grinned anyway, as her own grief changed to fierce triumph:_

 _“Oh, Papa,” she whispered. “You found him again.”_

end


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